It is said, invariably with a sigh and in mournful tones, that the press is biased—a proposition I find puzzling. The press is supposed to have a bias. Complaining that a newspaper is not objective is like complaining about a fish’s incessant swimming all over the place: “Can’t it sit still just for a minute or take a walk the way normal vertebrates do?”

It is another matter altogether that all newspapers in the United States, and, increasingly, in Europe as well, are biased in exactly the same way. It’s one thing to complain about fish swimming, but if all 32,000 species of them were to start shoaling and schooling like mackerel, eyebrows may legitimately elevate: “Ray, where is thy sting? Great White, whither thy pride?”

If the bias of today’s journalism is to be bemoaned, one ought to describe that bias properly. It would be all right if politically it was on the left, provided there were in abundant evidence all the gradations of liberalism, say, from John Stuart Mill to Herbert Marcuse. If these, moreover, were complemented by at least a minority press biased to the right, say, from G. K. Chesterton to Anders Breivik, then all would be well with the world.

“Mediocrity’s capacity for cruelty is unequaled by that of any perversion—sexual or otherwise.”

Yet such is not the case. You can say what you like about Stalin or Pol Pot, but just try saying something nice in print about Hitler, or even Mussolini. Thus, as a journalist, I cannot think of an organ of opinion—not even the one you’re presently reading—that would encourage me to describe, say, the neoconservative intellectual David Frum as “a dirty Jew.” No similar hindrance, however, inhibited a university professor once describing me in The New York Times as “an intellectual thug.”

Our press is biased to mediocrity. That this mediocrity happens to be generally left-wing is neither here nor there. Wouldn’t you be just as distressed if all the Western world’s newspapers spouted regurgitations of Houston Stewart Chamberlain instead of Leon Trotsky or Antonio Gramsci? Just imagine a crazy world where editorials lauding, say, Ted Kaczynski were as ubiquitous as real-world plaudits for the founders of the various free choice movements—anti-abortionists and anti-vivisectionists among them—whose activities, whether ethically or legally considered, amount to murder on a far greater scale than the Unabomber’s, while their motives are conspicuously less ideological or altruistic than his.

I thought of all this afresh just a few days ago when stumbling across an article in The New Yorker that exposed the secret vices of a teacher I’d had when, in the early 1970s, I briefly attended Horace Mann, a private school in New York, which was then all-boys. The man’s name is Mr. Berman, and I suppose the article affected me to the degree that it did because, in 1993, in The Gingerbread Race, an autobiography I wrote while living in England, I had dwelled on the contrast between education as Mr. Berman understood it and the education I would later find on offer at Yale. Basically, Mr. Berman believed that mediocrity—not vice, illiteracy, fascism, or the atom bomb—is the greatest threat to mankind.

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Well, according to the author of the article, as well as New York’s police commissioner, district attorney, and everybody else who is not too principled, or else not too lazy, to get involved with forty-year-old hearsay, poor old Mr. Berman molested his pupils. Now, one would’ve thought that the liberal-minded New Yorker was all in favor of child abuse—after all, if boys are not properly molested early enough in life, how will they know to grow up homosexual? How will they understand that, as consenting adults, they may exercise their free choice to molest others?

Less flippant, perhaps, is the reflection that New Yorkers of roughly the same mindset as the author of the New Yorker article instituted the elite school, where a century later Mr. Berman would come to teach, on the model of English public schools, where not only was homosexuality a constant of life, but authority, from master down to the lowest fag, was strictly vertical. Some would argue that abuse, in the broadest, not merely sexual sense, was what those schools were all about, while others would add that this has remained the case to the present day. So how can you have an exclusive British-style all-boys school where the boys are not abused and democratic egalitarianism reigns supreme?

None of this occurs to the article’s author, but this is not why the scandal so appositely illustrates Mr. Berman’s dictum that mediocrity, not vice, spells apocalypse for mankind. What illustrates it is that The American Conservative has since slavishly regurgitated the New Yorker article, arriving at pretty much the same oh-my-goodness-me conclusions: “The unnerving thing about it was that this man, Mr. Berman, was a nut treated like a guru by the boys he favored.”

Mr. Berman, incidentally, is still living. If he should read what I’m writing now, perhaps he may recall his own words to the effect that mediocrity’s capacity for cruelty is unequaled by that of any perversion—sexual or otherwise.

]]>Articles by Andrei NavrozovKierkegaard on the Catwalktag:takimag.com,2012:article/1.122712012-02-28T04:01:19Z2012-02-27T10:14:21ZAndrei Navrozovandreinavrozov@yahoo.com

Alexander McQueen

A prosperous, roly-poly Greek with a name that sounds like an Aztec root vegetable once proclaimed that if you have a brain, A cannot be both A and not A. Some twenty-one centuries later, a bookworm-poor, reed-thin, dark-cloaked Dane who for most of his life had been unhappy in love replied that if you’re in love, A can be anything.

Aristotle’s proposition was good for building railroads, winning wars, designing machine guns, inventing computers, spreading marmalade on toast, and organizing municipal rubbish collection—in short, for civilization generally. Kierkegaard’s rebuttal was only good for the soul and maybe for haute couture, too.

At times it may look as if science has finally bridged the chasm between the two positions. Our somber-suited physicists speak of subatomic particles’ irrational behavior while our crazy-haired artists are calculating enough not to fly commercial. Bankers turn green, flower children file their tax returns on time, and bloodthirsty tyrants call for democratic elections in places we never knew existed.

“Constraint, discomfort, anxiety, even frustration and fear: These are the modern hedonist’s playthings.”

At other times it seems that instead of the gods that the Age of Reason promised we would become, we now resemble the Dark Ages’ idea of the Antipodeans: walking on our heads, Tweeting strangers, and reading our fortunes from cardboard Starbucks cups. Juliet Googles Romeo. They txt, check out Ibiza, and live together like a pair of silicone peas in an iPod. He spends his nights watching porn and she does her own Botox. What other thereafter is there for such wretched heirs to the Age of Reason in a concrete world where A cannot be both A and not A?

Our notion of pleasure is wholly contingent on this dilemma. Should hedonists adopt the Aristotelian view of the global playpen—demanding ever-sweeter sugar, ever-louder music, ever-more Facebook friends, ever-longer orgasms, and ever-thicker lines of ever-purer cocaine, as well as more personal space, quality time, and peace on Earth in which to enjoy them—or should we go for the Kierkegaard option instead?

That would mean eating none but the darkest, bitterest chocolate; subjecting ourselves to the agonies of genuine feeling, which not only ruins the skin but carries the risk of a messy suicide and even a double murder; listening to music whose harmonies are complex and emotionally disturbing, ideally on an old gramophone in a velvet-suffocated room with only a narrow breach in the curtains’ faded brocade to admit sunlight; writing love letters on tear-stained, robin-blue Aerogram paper, scorching the mouth with bootleg absinthe, and leaving healthy wives for Moroccan nightclub dancers who turn out to be men; losing money at the tables not as the rich do (idly and painlessly), but like the desperate gambler who loses his one good shirt of cambric linen and goes home to homelessness in silent remorse and freezing rain; and yes, squeezing boldly, like Alizarine Yellow from a fat acrylic tube, into gowns of brilliantly dyed spider’s web and fine Flanders moonbeam, shameless in the décolletage yet straitlaced in the consequences, reflecting in men’s eyes, flirting with one’s own delectable shadow, thrilled to breathe, and dying to love.

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It would mean all that and a wagonload of experiences besides, but the sweet tooth of instant gratification, of boringly earned or serendipitously inherited creature comforts, of thoughtless Ibiza nights and lazy mornings on Panarea, is merely an X-ray of life to excite common dental hygienists. Constraint, discomfort, anxiety, even frustration and fear: These are the modern hedonist’s playthings. Bittersweet jouissance is more pleasurable than sweet plaisir. Ecstasy is more intoxicating than the pill that bears its name.

Where the Aristotelian’s pursuit of the active life has always made him something of a sadist—building empires, projecting reason’s power to Earth’s four corners, demanding submission from bodies both temporal and heavenly—the modern Kierkegaardian hedonist is highly contemplative and a bit of a masochist. Any woman whose pulse quickens as she uses her lover’s credit card to pay for the cutest of the season’s diabolical snares that is at least a size too small; any mermaid who swaps her natural form for the eroticized torment of a fairytale princess; any angel who senses her wings being singed in the flames of the unattainably human; any of these real, flesh-and-blood modern hedonists knows what, in our Antipodean hell of topsy-turvy rationality, being a bit of a masochist really means.

The modern hedonist has what psychiatrists call an active fantasy life, and in this his playground resembles Parisian catwalks. Not for him the drudge’s plainness, the accountant’s practicality, or the empire-builder’s providence. He dwells in impossibility, revels in discomfort, and would rather be plunged into iridescent penury than attain a dull eminence. If he could be bothered to design a coat of arms, it would depict the green helleborine Jocelyn Brooke immortalized in The Orchid Trilogy; fun for the botanist yet cleistogamous and self-loving, too. How shortsighted of Mademoiselle Coco to have chosen the saccharine-sweet camellia!

Bittersweet is more fun. Such is the modern hedonist’s mantra, and as he follows his hero Kierkegaard into the deepest vortices of life’s emotional currents, what pleasure he finds is heightened by the imagination’s sorrows. In the rational, practical, predictable world he reluctantly inhabits, he is a drama queen with real diamonds in her crown.

Avant-garde is an epidemic. From modern architecture—an added misfortune, like a hunchback struck down by elephantiasis—there is simply no escape, as its creedal symbols pursue me all over the European continent like the fiends of America’s cinematographic industry or the muttering of the witches in Macbeth. “People meet in architecture” is the prophecy of the Architecture Biennale, which opened in Venice last month. Accursed be that tongue that tells me so! I met my wife under the open skies of the Pyrenees.

From the Centrale in Milan to the Santa Lucia in Venice it went without a hitch, but a shock awaited us on arrival. Opposite the station—“half of glass, half of crap,” as the driver of the water taxi explained—there had appeared a new bridge. Completed a couple of years ago, long after I had quit Venice for the wilds of Sicily, it is the work of the famous Spanish architect Calatrava.

Historically there was only ever room for one bridge spanning the Grand Canal, the Rialto, or for three, if you count the Scalzi near the station and the Accademia, tactfully rendered in wood to impress its impermanence upon the local inhabitants. Yet the town that built St Mark’s knew how to build bridges no worse than the portly gentlemen with rat-tail moustaches from Calatrava’s studio who have now given Venice the new Constitution Bridge. In the thousand years of the town’s existence more than 400 bridges of Istria stone have been erected over the smaller canals, each testifying to the mastery of the architect and the generosity of the patron, usually the owner of the nearest palazzo. Yet the link between the two halves of the stone clamshell that Venice resembles remained firmly in the hands—and in the feet—of the gondoliers, manning the multiple ferry stations for those wishing to cross the Grand Canal.

If Venice is to continue to attract its visitors, it must safeguard its identity as a living and breathing relic, not an Italian branch of The Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas.

The gondoliers are an ancient guild in some ways reminiscent of London’s black taxicab fraternity, in turn glorying in its famous Hackney antecedent. As visitors to the capital soon hear, it takes three years of study, including a motorbike stint whose aim is to familiarize the apprentice driver with the exigencies of traffic congestion, to obtain the license. As a result, not only are London taxis the best in the world, their drivers make up the single most honest, serious, and intelligent segment of the population of Britain. Were the meretricious posers of the House of Commons replaced with these denizens of the East End, Britain’s fortunes would doubtless mend overnight.

So, too, with the gondoliers of Venice in their collective role of pontiff. Why change the millennial order of things, then, by building another bridge, thus weakening the gondoliers’ guild and pushing them to become the singing, dancing and thieving tourist attraction that ignorant tourists think they are anyway? True, there are 200 visitors here for every native. Yet if the town is to continue to attract them, it must safeguard its identity as a living and breathing relic, not an Italian branch of The Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas.

“Why? To steal money, of course,” said the water taxi driver as he cut out the engine, mooring the boat by the mossy walls of an estate on the Giudecca, where my oldest friend in Venice, Giovanni Volpi, had offered me a bed and a supper. I thought I detected a Sicilian glint in the driver’s eyes.

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In the morning we made our way to Giardini, where the Mostra internazionale di architettura has pitched its tents since the last century. Incomprehensible slogans in Eurenglish (“contemporary culture’s curatorial bias, an event serving as both a register and an infrastructure”), set in experimental, hallucinogentic typefaces, were everywhere, but we headed past them for the Russian pavilion, built in 1913 by an honest man called Shchusev in the delectable style of a Napoleon pastry. Surely the new capitalist Russia had not had time to scale the heights of Western avant-garde depravity, itself an heir to the Bolshevik revolution?

There was another reason I wanted to see what my compatriots had been up to. Old Shchusev built well because in the old days there was no call for rubbish. To build to steal money is a modern invention, like concentration camps and bad restaurants. Rather like the mass tourist or the Gulag inmate, the Western taxpayer is a citizen without rights; he is there to be fleeced, after having been thoroughly brainwashed with slogans like those of the Biennale, while his native city becomes a nightmare of alienation. In contemporary Russia, on the other hand, things are done differently; there, people in power steal at the source, without bothering with paradoxes in concrete and glass. Monumental steel spirals expressive of mankind’s hope, giant dog kennels lined with mauve astroturf, harebrained projections of capitalism’s luminous future—all that is unnecessary. Any post-Soviet apparatchik worth his Swiss bank account knows exactly where to steal, how to steal, and when to steal. Art, for him, is a nuisance.

This is why the exposition on view in the Russian pavilion was so clueless. The idea was to show how a small provincial town the size of Venice, Vishny Volochek by name, could be rejuvenated and modernized. Needless to say, this called for the construction of a lot of things like the Constitution Bridge, as well as cinemas, conference centres, art galleries, and the other “spaces” without which, in the West, the life of a thief with cultural affiliations becomes claustrophobic. But why in Vyshny Volochek, for crying out loud?

There was a projection room in the pavilion, where a grainy film of life in the dreary town was being shown. It all looked like Italy in the late 1940’s, with boys diving off a bridge into the river, with girls smiling as girls do not permit themselves to smile today, mysteriously and a little sadly, with old men fishing against the background of factory chimneys billowing smoke.

Change all this? Without even the justification of stealing, as in Venice? Uproot it all, and replace it with cinemas showing Saw 3 and exhibition halls filled with Damien Hirst wannabes? Thank God all the money in Vishny Volochek has long been stolen!

As we were leaving Giardini, we found ourselves wishing a similar fate upon Venice.

It was a sunny day like any other in London, and if you believe this you will renew your subscription to The New Criterion. The truth is, I had not spent any time here for the better part of three years, and after the lackadaisically African, insular and solar, tranquillity of Sicily the steam-powered novelty of the metropolis was all but rending me in twain. Like a modern-day Tarzan, of a Sunday I sought refuge in Regent’s Park, only to find myself surrounded by some of the fifty thousand people streaming through Frieze, “the world’s largest contemporary art fair,” as a vicious-looking stable lad at the entrance to the labyrinthine complex of tents confided in a Cockney baritone, “after Basel, tha’ is.” It was the last day of the exhibition for the 151 art galleries participating in the extravaganza. Obediently, like a provincial gull taken in by a circus poster advertising the world’s second-stupidest man, I bought myself a ticket.

Some of Dostoevsky’s most radical works, including Notes from the Underground and Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, were suggested by the publicity that European industrial expositions, such as Crystal Palace, were then receiving. The gull’s consolation prize, as I walked through the maze of tents, was the awareness that here was a moment in the development of Western culture in every way as pivotal as the Paris Universal Exposition, and that London was once again the tabernacle of progress, that is to say, of the abstraction in which men believe in so far as they equate their faith in it with reason.

My stupefaction by London had had an underlying theme, which can be summed up as the realisation that the art of representing women in Western culture, central from at least the Renaissance to the novels of the nineteenth century, has been replaced by the art of adorning them: by makeup, hairdressing and dressmaking, by the cosmetics industry and by the incalculable myriad enterprises that, like the artists’ workshops of old, strive to elevate their craft to a position of predominance. “To be adored, she must be adorned,” wrote Baudelaire. Already in 1867, the Magasin des Demoiselles – with a frankness that brings to mind Feuerbach’s dictum that nowadays “truth is considered profane and only illusion is sacred” – described the Paris Exposition, intended by its organisers as an overview of man’s technological achievement since the wheel, as “consecrated” to fabrics, clothing, ornaments and perfumes.

Today, the world market for conventional works of art is dwarfed by the cosmetics industry alone, though lipsticks and creams are a mere bagatelle when one considers the whole panoply of unconventional, contemporary, living arts that go into the making of the modern European woman, who has turned every provincial town centre into a caricature of the Faubourg St Honoré and has set for the global manufacturing industry the course of all future development. The international auction houses, whose performance is a good indication of the vitality of the art market, sold €7 billion worth of paintings and sculptures last year, most of them by other than living artists. By contrast, just the European market for cosmetics has been valued by the European Commission at €100 billion, while since 1958 the industry as a whole has grown at the average annual rate of 4% as compared with 2.8% for all manufacturing.

In short, I was entering Frieze with the conviction that what I was about to see was a displaced art, an art that has been rendered all but irrelevant, an art as marginal to the modern epoch as the art of baliage was to the Renaissance. To be sure, Venetian women had special crownless hats in which they took the sun on their rooftop altane to make their hair blonder, but it would be absurd to suppose that the manufacturer of these devices ever played a social role in some way commensurate to that of the painter of church frescos. Today, it is the New York visagiste’s styles of painting, or the Rio plastic surgeon’s sculptures, that are at the cutting edge of creativity and at the very pinnacle of social importance in our most serene global republic.

What I saw on that Sunday afternoon confirmed my intuition that the epochal significance of Frieze and other such expositions is that they have no significance: no impact on how people think or feel, no effect on their ambitions and frustrations, no relevance to the dozen ways in which the clockwork of Western society calculates. As visitors left the tents to roam through the park, their uplifted hands—which had been marked with invisible ink in case they wished to return to the fair—reminded me of worshipers in the queue for Holy Communion. The Christian church may be dying, but their interest in art appeared, if anything, more perfunctory than a Milanese banker’s minute of contemplation in the Duomo. Why look at the nude by X, their eyes seemed to say, when there is a much bigger one advertising a brassiere on the hoarding in Piccadilly Circus? What’s the big deal about the face in the sculpture by Y, when my sister-in-law had just had hers done and it looks every inch as chiselled?

The creative aims of the dying art on display, as though exactly with these disillusioning juxtapositions in mind, have been adjusted accordingly. The overall result is nothing if not reminiscent of a Marxist’s critique of religion, in which words like befuddle, mumbo jumbo, absurd, sweet dulcimer, ritual, irrational, hypocrisy and of course exploitation are relied upon to sustain the familiar argument that faith is the humbling of the masses by a ruling social elite. As I say, of faith in the power of art there was no more than a mustard seed’s worth at Frieze; yet equally, just as the Marxist would level his heaviest blows upon the institutions of a religion rather than the religion’s founding message, I would argue that the whole organum of contemporary art represented at Frieze has been designed in order to befuddle, to humiliate and to exploit. Had I the authority of the Inquisition, I would frogmarch a contemporary commentator on religion like Christopher Hitchens through all 151 of its galleries, in leg irons of course, to make the man understand what hypocrisy really is.

The works may be abstract, I noted, but the grub is as concrete as it comes. London’s renowned Le Caprice, “proud to support contemporary art by being at Frieze Art Fair for the fifth year,” lurked in the intestine depths of the labyrinth, with Braised Ham Hock with Parsley and Caper Sauce, Rump of Lamb with Autumn Squash, Pancetta & Sage, and of course Yellow-Fin Tuna with Spiced Lentils & Rocket on the menu, routinely followed by Scandinavian Iced Berries with Hot White Chocolate Sauce “or simply a glass” of chilled Château Partarrieu. Just metres away, monsters multiplied, homunculi coupled, lemurs growled and incubi vied for column inches with succubi in a grandiose panorama of deliberately indigestible, thoughtfully unappetising, maliciously repulsive foolishness. Had it been more homogenous, it might have resembled a museum of the circus. But as heterogeneity was among its vaunted achievements, it looked instead like the higgledy-piggledy display of specimen jars in which curiosities, meaning physiological aberrations of various kinds, used to be exhibited at fairgrounds until more humane laws forbade it.

A pair of Siamese twins in formaldehyde, provided the liquid was a shocking pink and the infants were joined together in some particularly disturbing manner, would have made for a suitable exhibit in one of the tents, as doubtless would the picture, foreshadowed in the story by Saki, of the hyenas dying in Trafalgar Square. Geeks, freaks, hairless dwarves, chess-playing automatons and sword-swallowing monkeys were at a premium, as they might be in swinging Westphalia in the aftermath of the Thirty Years War. Zany was the byword, with its corollaries of crazy, weird and spooky, while the attitude of the spectators, or rather of the gawkers, could be described as a mild yearning for one of life’s minor miracles, such as a smirk or a guffaw.

Philosophically, it was all about wishful thinking by syllogism. “Art is innovation,” ran the tacit argument. “If form is old hat, then deformity is cutting edge. Since nature is not art, perversion must qualify. Given that beauty is the stuff of women’s magazines and the makeup counter at Harrods, by definition ugliness has aesthetic value. If a Chanel lipstick is made with the precision of a gunlock, a Breguet tells the time long after Pushkin is dead and the silks of Hermès have a broader palette than Renoir’s, then the avant-garde way forward is in the direction of ineptitude, crayon and loo paper.” Such syllogism is reactionary, that is to say revolutionary. It is the insurrection of the faithless against the essential asymmetry of life. And, as with most revolutions, its real aims are the Braised Ham Hock and the chilled Sauternes.

It is all as it should be, however, in the historical home of the Industrial Revolution. Like religion, art began as metaphor. The materialist upheaval so weighted its main term that the metaphor became inutile, for why should a workman gaze at an image of the Virgin on a square of canvas when he can have the Virgin appear to him on the television screen in the privacy of his front parlour and speak to him in the words of a Hollywood script? Clearly, even nineteenth-century still photography, to say nothing of modern life-size plasma screens with their promise of interactive pornography, loads the dice of metaphor in favour of pseudo-reality to such a shameless degree that art cannot but lose. Why should a contemporary Pygmalion bother sculpting his Galatea? If he has money enough for plastic surgeons, makeup artists and dress designers, any juvenile unfortunate from the modern Haymarket of Eastern Europe will readily oblige him by coming to life. And if he doesn’t, he can always rent The Story of O.

Perhaps apocryphally, a reactionary by the name of Hitler once pronounced that colour film is the way of the future. Pseudo-reality would have been much broader and more accurate, but in any case the fulfilment of this apocalyptic prophecy, if Frieze is any indication, is at hand. The faithless Renaissance of our time is a utopia of material luxury, wherein the simulacrum of physical pleasure, as Guy Debord wrote in The Society of the Spectacle, is “a visual deception produced by mass media technologies.” Hence the revolutionary pseudo-art in Regent’s Park, and the dying hyenas that are its sole aesthetic hereditament.

In the 1930s even some of the older and more intellectual Russians, including those who had seen a bit of the world in their youth, believed that the United States was the land of the Yellow Devil, meaning gold. It was said that when one American met another in the street, he greeted him as follows: “Make money?” To which the other replied, with Puritan candour: “Very much, thank you.” To those Americans, our grandfathers knew, nothing was sacred. Their tabernacles were to Moloch, their culture was as venal as their women, and needless to say their women were all sluts.

Like every extreme beloved of John Stuart Mill, this worldview was not to be dismissed out of hand. Its origins were only in part Soviet propaganda, designed to discredit the West, and the New World in particular, while leaving no doubt in anybody’s mind as to where the newest, bravest and best of all possible worlds was to be found. The other part, however, derived from traditional European scepticism with respect to various colonial upstarts, and had much to recommend itself, albeit with certain caveats. It may be noted, for instance, that it was precisely at the historical moment when genuine American culture had reached its apogee in Emily Dickinson, Poe, Thoreau, Emerson, and finally Mark Twain, that European scoffers were at their loudest in proclaiming America a nation of illiterate cowboys. Today, when the world is awash with Hollywood sewage and Manhattanite solipsism, Europe’s remaining snobs have gone strangely quiet.

The newest, bravest and best of all possible worlds had no time for such reticence at any point in the development of the Soviet state. Wagons of Lenin, Stalin and other prizes had been lavished on writers, Russian as well as foreign, who sought to demonstrate the essential cupidity of the West. Of course there had been snafus as well, as when the film based on Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath was first screened in Russia. Presented with this spectacle of destitution set in the Depression, the general population watched it a little too avidly, assuming it was a story about unhappy millionaires, something like Dynasty of the day, because the film’s characters drove about in their own lorries and got out of bed whenever the hell they liked.

Much has changed since then, as I am often told, though not in the way people who tell me so think it has. More than fifteen years ago, in a little book entitled The Coming Order, I analysed the totality of social change known as the collapse of the Soviet Union, concluding that the “collapse” was a fiction made credible by the dramatic transfer of political power from the old Communist Party establishment to the apparatus of the secret police. Totalitarianism had not died, it was merely moulting.

There were two types of reaction to my thesis. A few people said I was wrong. Most people said I was right but that could not matter, because, given midnight raves, computers, Coca Cola, newspapers like the New York Times, democratic oratory and the rest of the blessings of liberty, no regime, no matter how recalcitrant, could in the end resist becoming like ourselves. I should add that the orgy of wishful thinking, which continues to this day, has been made possible less by the West’s chronic misunderstanding of totalitarianism then by its superficial understanding of itself.

Together with democratic oratory, at length all the vices of the West became part of the creature’s new plumage. Economic freedom, in particular, had to be artificially seeded, with the ruling junta handing over a small percentage of the country’s vast natural assets to several hundred individuals, few of whom, incidentally, had had ties to the secret police. The allocation of resources was all but random, since the object of the exercise was not so much rewarding the faithful as creating a plausible simulacrum of economic liberty, one that would suit the renovated facade of social and political change.

In this dynamic moulage—which made the phrase “Wild West” a favourite among political optimists with a hopeful eye on Russia—crime, drugs, gambling, pornography and prostitution now played the part of Lenin’s interpretations of Marx, Stalin’s studies in linguistics or Brezhnev’s wartime reminiscences in the old Soviet iconostasis. They were essential components of what, in the West’s own myopic conception of history, constituted civic evolution. And the common denominator of all these components, elemental as the motive of all the desperate men in Jack London’s tales of the Yukon, was money.

In terms of the vastness of even the small fraction of Russia’s natural wealth “privatised” by the ruling junta to launch the deception, Klondike was nothing. Soviet totalitarianism rarely stooped to engage the West on the battlefields of commerce and trade, preferring to invest its wherewithal in titanium submarines and cavitation torpedoes. Now the New Russian “oligarchs,” as the largely clueless winners of the junta’s sweepstakes had been mistakenly christened, came to roam Europe as financial conquistadors, sweeping all in their path. They became the face of the Russian opportunity, the White Rock Girl of every Western political optimist’s dreams, the bankable evidence that the Cold War was over and totalitarianism was dead.

Alarming as my thesis of more than fifteen years ago may strike those with the mental energy to consider its implications, the present-day financial conquest of Europe by gangs of marauding New Russians is disturbing, if only in purely aesthetic terms, even to people who otherwise have little time for politics. As over the years I have known a number of these “oligarchs” personally, it may be interesting to describe them as a social species.

Daughters of dukes, when asked how they got the plum job, usually answer that they had been lucky. Lottery winners, by contrast, tend to ascribe their good fortune to innate factors, such as being able to whistle from an early age. Similarly, every member of the species under discussion likes to suggest that his random luck has had much to do with his political past in Russia, notwithstanding that what this plainly implies is that he was a KGB factotum. Two of the most notorious players at this game have had their fortunes handed them on a plate, literally, while sitting in Boris Yeltsin’s kitchen in their capacity as the presidential daughter’s lovers. Yet each in his own way would hint at a cloak-and-dagger story of political intrigue that has made him the tycoon he is.

When something untoward happens to a member of the species, such as the arrest, imprisonment and confiscation of assets that befell the “oligarch” Khodorkovsky and his oil company, neither the victim nor anyone else in his milieu can account for the event. The strategic exigencies of the ruling junta are a closed book for these macho men, who tend to know less about what makes the Kremlin tick than the average informed bystander. Even when one of them withdraws into opposition and proclaims himself an exile, his understanding of the larger political puzzle, of which he is but a minuscule piece, is at best ordinary.

Another distinguishing characteristic of the species is their attitude to money. Unlike the robber barons in the land of the Yellow Devil, who, unbeknown to most Europeans, invested the gold in their family names, thus creating the aristocracy of America, Russian prospectors do just what our grandfathers once imagined soulless American vulgarians doing: shopping. With the exception of the jailed Khodorkovsky, not one of them has endowed a foundation, built a museum, or financed so much as his own private library. Not one has become famous for a miracle of charity, even of the sort that the mafia in Italy sometimes performs by capping the lease on the house of a poor widow, along with the greedy landlord’s knee for good measure.

Instead, a Portland company called U. S. Submarine reports that the waiting list for its products reads like a page from the Vladivostok telephone directory. The 65-metre, 1500-tonne Phoenix-1000, its premier submarine, costing about $100 million, is capable of remaining for 30 days at a depth of 300 metres, allegedly useful for surviving a nuclear holocaust. A swimming pool, a wine cellar and a screening room are some of the consolations on board. One doubts, however, that Captain Nemoff’s connections in the Kremlin can ensure he has notice enough to order full immersion before any of the global unpleasantness begins. It is this sort of naïve, boy’s-own version of conspicuous consumption that sets apart the New Russians, though it must be noted that an American reader of Jules Verne, Paul Allen, is among these future survivors of World War III.

Of course America’s oligarchs of the 1900s were also famous for vain or infantile follies, such as importing French chateaux to California, and this has a working analogue in one Russian’s recent purchase of a Boeing 787, rebuilt by BMW to include a parking place for his BMW. But the construction, by the visionary with the unlikely name of Pasternak and his company called Worldwide Aeros, of “flying yachts” such as ML866, vertical lift-off dirigible-like crafts with 500 square metres of “residential space,” is without precedent in the history of human vanity, unless one thinks back to Emperor Nero. I mean, Neroff.

Our grandfathers’ generation slandered Americans by saying they all believed that everything in the world has a price. In Moscow today, a provincial girl’s virginity has a set price, which is $40,000. Yet the whole notion of virginity, indeed of quality rather than quantity, rather belongs to the cultural universe of our grandfathers. It is an open secret among London callgirls that one Russian tycoon, after summoning a dozen of them to a party, has glasses of champagne offered to the hapless creatures with a gemstone in every glass, which those determined enough to swallow get to keep. One thinks of Philip II of Spain, in the days of the Reformation, depicted amusing himself in this way by his Dutch detractors.

The pistes of France, the chalets of Switzerland and the coves of Sardinia are now unrecognisable. At $3000-a-night hotel room at the Cala di Volpe in Porto Cervo is a sign of what Orwell called verminous poverty, a blunt man in reservations having told a Lebanese friend of mine who wanted to stay there a few weeks ago that the Russians had taken all the suites. The soap opera of indiscriminate consumption, for which the Arabs were once renowned the world over, seems as refined in retrospect as a libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal.

The implications should be sufficiently clear even to those who pride themselves on their ignorance of politics. An aesthete who looks to the new species for the qualities of character that made the New World what it is—“commercial respectability,” as George Bernard Shaw enumerated “the first fruits of plutocracy in the earlier stages of industrial development” in a preface to one of his plays, and “fear of hell always at war with fear of poverty” – will find an evil-smelling hole.

Living high on the hog may have its rewards, but the prospect of civic evolution is not among them.

The formula that I have long toyed with the notion of revealing is nowadays the intellectual property of Conde Nast, yet the kind of article discussed here would not look out of place in any of number of niche publications, from Plage and Piste to the more sombre Snort! and Anorexia Today. Still more encouraging for the canny sycophant considering journalism as a career is the fact that successful editors everywhere, including those on magazines believed to be serious and newspapers known as highbrow, will always respect a quality product manufactured according to the formula, in contrast to something thrown together higgledy-piggledy, with the author’s own idea as a guide. The pathetic originality of a Mark Twain and the amateur dramatics of a Dostoevsky are no longer among the models an aspiring writer should follow if he wants to see his name in print and be asked to nice people’s houses for after-dinner drinks.

The first step is to select, if possible on a tidy work surface adequately illuminated with artificial light, a few hundred words of the English language, dividing them into three groups, nouns, adjectives, and adverbs. The key to the formula, as will be seen presently, is the last of the three, because serious journalistic writing, such as that found in the news pages of Gay Times or any other newspaper with Times in its title, is traditionally poor in adverbs. Conversely, the formula, which is versatile enough to cover everything with the exception of Brooklyn fires, presidential elections, and rumours of World War III, has been designed to yield writing that is luxuriant to the eye and melodious to the ear, an Old World simulacrum of leisure, liberty, and reflection. Counterfeiting the attitudes to life and society for which writers like Waugh and Powell were once famous, it feigns spontaneity, pretends to opinion, and seeks to co-opt the reader by bribing him with handouts of class complicity.

An American thesaurus is a good way of sourcing the necessary ingredients. Beginning with the entry for “Wealth” to stockpile such nouns as prince,baron, heir, tycoon, magnate, oligarch, and noting useful adjectives like billionaire, affluent, glittering, a writer can generate sentences on a variety of subjects, secure in his knowledge that gold is the thread of propinquity interweaving all nurture and much of nature in a world without gods or kings. Without adverbs, however, such knowledge must remain inert, lifeless, of no real use to any but the most high-minded editors and small-circulation journals. A description like Russian billionaire tycoon may be good enough for The Spectator or The Nation, for fuddy-duddies, for people who cling to the variously anachronistic conceptions of society and express them on matte, yellowish, inexpensive or even recycled paper. Yet in the dynamic world of novelty, fashion, and gloss, such a description will never pass muster, in the sense that it neither sounds sexy nor looks eccentric enough to satisfy the reader’s appetite for the truth and to involve him in its creation; a sexily eccentric Russian billionaire tycoon, on the other hand, sweeps him up into the social whirl, much as a nineteenth-century novel of aristocratic life might provide a vicarious bystander like Lenin with all the resentment he needed for a successful career in politics.

Thus Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov, the sexily eccentric Russian tycoon. Engagingly blunt and charmingly enigmatic are on standby. Add with Royal connections, since, while the emendation is safely meaningless, the dynamic world of today’s journalism is Manichaean and likes to serve up its predicates in clusters, wherein royal, princely, aristocratic, powerful, palatial, exclusive, and on occasion even reclusive, can happily coexist with the lucrative manufacturing of rubber items and the recent innovations in cosmetic dentistry. To some extent, this is an old American tradition, which has thrown up the familiar notions of robber barons, merchant princes and safety-pin kings, though here its indiscriminate extrapolation is, if anything, more barbarous than any such essays in egalitarian shorthand, bringing to mind the Russian folk saying to the effect that you can never ruin porridge with more butter.

The round of festivities on Mr Ivanov’s, give length in feet, motor yacht, providing name of vessel and indicating its plausible location in South of France, may be described as unabashedly glittering to suggest that neither the sexily eccentric tycoon with Royal connections himself, nor the salaried hack sucking up to him in the article, is politically correct, that he is, indeed, a kindred soul, a daredevil of the pen as much as his subject is a swashbuckler of industry. Now is hardly the time to skimp on particulars, insinuating as many magnums of reassuringly vintage Krugand unmistakeably Valentino couturegownsas can fit into a single craven eulogy. Yet at some point the writer must pause, because an important strategic decision needs to be taken before proceeding.

The writer is at a dangerous crossroads. The choice before him is whether to turn right or left, whether to keep on ingratiating himself with the milieu to which his subject ostensibly belongs or to throw in his lot with his own class, that of journalists, editors, authors, university graduates living on fixed incomes, of consumerism’s undeserved losers and society’s unfunny clowns, as he unconsciously yet unerringly regards them. Never mind that an old college buddy of his has been living in actual destitution, writing the great American novel for the last twenty years, and can now hold up his head with the best whether or not his book should ever find a publisher; never mind that the engagingly blunt Russian crook he is eulogising is a wife-beating ogre, who is also a moron (insofar as he believes that he will get to keep the money he has stolen from other crooks). To the Tatler or Vanity Fair mind, a class is a class, failure is the opposite of success, and fame is not as good as money but a great deal better than nothing. At this juncture, and thus reasoning, he is therefore likely to turn to the left, in the direction of the milieu where his own name has been established, and to butter the porridge accordingly.

Not something that I personally could ever afford is a good way to put some distance between oneself, one’s subject and this malevolent audience. Moreover, one can fill that distance with impenetrable coyness by claiming, for instance, that a Valentino couture gown costs an outrageous $5,000, whereas in reality it costs ten times that amount. Thus, every single item in the British press on the rise and fall of the charmingly enigmatic journalist Barbara Amiel — who, while married to the engagingly blunt Canadian press baron Conrad Black, bought dresses, handbags and shoes that her serious colleagues regarded as inappropriate to her station — made use at least one such smokescreen, behind which the virtue of the author of the item was safe from suspicion of any vicarious familiarity with material luxury.

Accuracy breeds resentment. It has been an egregious career error, I suspect, on the part of the ordinarily shrewd Tina Brown, to write with such perfect nonchalance — as she does in her recent biography of Princess Diana, the “maiden foray into long-form non-fiction” regarded by many as her one shot at a comeback to serious journalism – of her subject’s “£3,000-a-week grooming budget” and mobile telephone bills of "between five and ten thousand pounds a month." She had neglected to put in the adverbs. Straight away, in the Guardian, a colleague struck out at the deliciously exposed jugular, regretting that “really there’s only one blonde in this story and it’s not Diana.” Moreover, in a vicious reference to the charmingly enigmatic past of the erstwhile darling of Conde Nast, Sarah Bradford was able to conclude that “you can take the girl out of the magazine, but you can’t take the magazine out of the girl.”

This is all very well and thanks for the guidance, a newcomer to the profession may exclaim, but what of the actual idea animating the article? The idea, of course, is that there shouldn’t be one. The whole idea of ideas is that, like musical compositions in the tonal age, they are something worse than inept unless they are inherently consistent. In some very certain way, formal rather than formulaic, each must exhibit an introduction, a development, and a recapitulation. Yet, like much serious music, serious journalism has purposefully freed itself from these trammels, and the attempted imposition of a cogent idea upon the boilerplate dodecaphony of internal contradiction can only expose the charmingly enigmatic composer for the careerist lickspittle that he is.

Anybody who has ever made merry by leafing through an issue of Cosmopolitan knows that today’s successful young woman is happily married yet still happier single, that she stands by her man yet has many lovers, that she is virtuous yet possessed of a whole lot of outrageously expensive shoes, handbags, lipsticks and creams. It is in these same modal terms, calling to mind what musicians refer to as defunct harmonies, that the enterprising journalist must learn to describe everything from the conflict in Iraq to Hegel’s phenomenology, confident in the knowledge, I repeat, that in the end it is only money that matters.

If possession is nine-tenths of the content, qualification is nine-tenths of the form. So let us babble away as though civilisation were an episode of The Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous set someplace east of the Urals, yet with careful attention to the English adverbs without whose mediating influence even a hardened professional can find herself out in the cold in a country as temperate as Great Britain. They are a wonderful way to make an abstraction of even the most conventional narrative, weaving contradiction, absurdity, and irresponsibility into the fabric of modern journalism out of whose warm tartan folds, engagingly blunt, naked consumerism leers at the unwary in a presentiment of some greater obscenity in its gift.

]]>Articles by Andrei NavrozovThe Last Time I Saw Paristag:takimag.com,2007:article/1.105442007-07-16T03:01:00Z1999-11-30T00:00:00ZAndrei Navrozovandreinavrozov@yahoo.comBy Paris, I can reveal, I mean Miss Paris Hilton, though why should so extraordinary a reminiscence visit me all of a sudden is something of a puzzle. The most likely explanation is that I have gone temporarily soft in the head as a result of reviewing Tina Brown’s biography of the Princess of Wales for Chronicles magazine. The literary editor there should have added me to the milk delivery list, as they used to do in Russia with people who handled hazardous material in weapons laboratories.

Even in some of my saner moments, however, I can detect within myself a tendency of character that transforms me into a kind of Taki of the Gutter. Thus I may be the only writer you will ever read who has met both Paris Hilton and David Frum, a fact I adduce here with neither pride nor shame, merely as evidence of my indiscriminate, some would say alcoholically induced, gregariousness. Miss Hilton I met in Cannes, at a drinks party on a big tugboat by the name of Octopus, which I distinctly remember some people calling a yacht because it belonged to somebody who could afford one. Her journalistic counterpart I knew at university, where Mr Frum already stood out among his peers as a conspicuous toady, a superior liar, and a remarkably naff dresser.

Two Yale Daily News activists, if I my memory of events so distant does not fail me, were out to get me when I ran The Yale Literary Magazine, Mr Frum and another toady called Jacob Levich. The latter, you see, was politically of the Left. This obliged him to cast his toadying to the university administration, which wanted to shut the Lit down, in such terms as these: “This is not ordinary snobbery, it is snobbery of a peculiarly reactionary sort. The Lit is not simply condemning bad verse. What the Lit really objects to is bad verse in the modern idiom.” Mr Frum, by contrast, was a man of the Right, which allowed him to improve on his colleague’s brownnosing along these lines: “The Lit is not reactionary. It is merely bad.” Conservatives, Mr Frum concluded, “are being blamed for magazines like the Lit, and it is very embarrassing.” Perhaps there was a third toady on that team, but I cannot find all the relevant newspaper cuttings just at the moment. In any case, American politics being notoriously bipolar, the ideal of sycophancy was served well enough as it was.

It is this unquenchable appetite for approval that makes Mr Frum a plausible analogue of my Octopus drinking companion, Miss Hilton. The salivary secretions they direct at the media’s nether parts are conceived by them, to quote the title of a mercifully forgotten work by a madman beloved of Tolstoy, as “A Philosophy of the Common Task.” Of the dead, nil nisi bene, but perhaps it may be forgiven me if I hint obliquely that that the biography I have just finished reading records the earthly achievement of an individual who, far more decisively than poor mad old Fedorov, is the original progenitor of this remarkably modern school of philosophy.

“A modest tone is really much the nicest,” Mr Frum lectured the Lit’s editors. “A truly conservative literary magazine need not exclude the exciting and the innovative.” How uncannily similar this sounds, in retrospect, to the late Queen of People’s Hearts telling an international psychiatry symposium of eight hundred specialists that “a hug is cheap, environmentally friendly and needs minimal instruction.” How like the average hypocrite and babbler, writing in a national newspaper that the British monarchy needs to evolve and change with the times when all he really means is that Buckingham Palace ought to have asked him to the garden party. How like Tina Brown herself, who would have us believe that her subject’s indefatigable brownnosing of the media is an act of revolutionary defiance.

I remember how a journalist known by the nickname of Greenslime—gentle reader, not only have I made friends with Paris Hilton and David Frum, but with Roy Greenslade as well!—was late coming over to dinner at my house in London one night, explaining that he had been detained at an important meeting of the British Republican Society, an organisation he directed. A Russian photographer was one of the twelve to dinner, or maybe it was thirteen, and in his broken English the innocent asked what “republican” meant. Greenslime explained, patiently choosing simple words to covey the meaning of the term as he himself understood it. “Somebody call police,” my benighted guest said after a brief silence. “He want to kill Queen.” Myself no stranger to sycophancy, though strictly in its cravenly domestic or opportunistically social applications, years later I told this story to HRH the Duke of Kent, who at once rewarded me with a top-up of my Negroni.

My repeating it here is a prelude to a confession. I used to be as direct, as intemperate, as “immoderate” as David Frum might say, as my Russian dinner guest, seizing on my opponents’ weaknesses, studying their Achilles’ heels as if they were prospective scalps, hankering for sanguine revenge and biblical justice. Thus I confess that at some point in my life at Yale I had made a vow, which some years later I came within a hair’s breadth of fulfilling at a Chronicles banquet in Chicago, that should I ever come across David Frum in the flesh, I would dunk his head in the nearest available public toilet. And, if you really want the ugly truth, that Mohawk vow still resounds somewhere within my manly breast.

And yet, after reading the biography of Diana, I realise how much I have mellowed. Human life is so damn complicated, motivations so elusive, explanations in the final analysis so terribly evanescent. One must have a heart of stone, for instance, not to be moved by the convulsive thrashings of a young woman who craves attention, spiralling ever deeper into a public trap of her own making, however destructive her agony might be to the social institutions one admires and values. Similarly, Mr Frum’s salivary exertions, nominally in the service of his country but in all probability directed at securing invitations to Washington garden parties for their author, are moving in their own way, if not to the point of actual tears as in the case of the People’s Princess, then at least to the point of disinterested reflection. And even this perceived disparity is probably due to the fact that a fat man with a natty bow tie appears so much less deserving of sympathy than a slim woman in a sequined cocktail dress by Catherine Walker.

“Wise conservatism,” wrote Mr Frum about himself in fabulously remote 1981, contrasting his own column in a student newspaper with the national magazine I had built from the ground up with my own hands, “prunes the branches to preserve he root.” Doubtless this is just what that other, blonde and willowy, neoconservative began doing in that same year, intent as she was on “reforming” and “healing” the Monarchy as if it were a Rio cokehead about to undergo surgery on her nose, or a Chelsea bulimic beset by “guilt, self-revulsion and low personal esteem.” A question that arises, however, is why this particular therapeutic approach to people and institutions should be regarded as any more inherently “conservative” than the socialism of a Fedorov, the liberalism of a Levich, or the republicanism of a Greenslade.

I can only come to the conclusion that “neoconservatism,” as the intellectual movement in which Mr Frum now plays a leading role is called by some, is fundamentally and quintessentially girlish twaddle, distinguished from that of its svelte Chelsea progenitor merely by the length of the words and the number of historical allusions in its policy statements. Stalin had Marshal Tukhachevsky executed by firing squad because he kept pestering him to build tanks without telling the boss how to build the factories that build them. This is good precedent for all men of good will to cheer wildly at the eventual prospect of my settling old collegiate scores with Mr Frum in a public washroom, but as I say I have mellowed. Like my Sovereign, nowadays I too feel sad at the thought of Princess Diana’s martyrdom to platitude, though thankfully I am not under any political pressure to show it.

Give me time. Like the American public, perhaps one day I shall come to grieve openly for Miss Hilton, blonde and willowy throughout her ordeal. Or was that a neoconservative act of moderate defiance against the third branch of government, reforming and healing in its intent to preserve the roots of American democracy at whatever personal cost?

]]>Articles by Andrei NavrozovThe Right to Shirktag:takimag.com,2007:article/1.106032007-06-06T03:01:00Z1999-11-30T00:00:00ZAndrei Navrozovandreinavrozov@yahoo.comOn an Internet site called American Rhetoric, one can hear the famous State of the Union oration delivered by President Roosevelt on 6 January 1941 and known as “The Four Freedoms” speech. A cynically minded pacifist might argue that the actual point of the speaker’s exertions, veiled though it is in patriotic badinage, is to persuade the Congress that “sacrifice means the payment of more money in taxes.” I would argue that the President’s address is a good illustration of Remy de Gourmont’s mot to the effect that the mind of a civilised man is a museum of mutually contradictory fictions.

Roosevelt’s temporising in anticipation of Pearl Harbour, if that is what it is, is not my subject here. I am concerned with the essence of a civilised man’s attitude to liberty, or rather with its quintessence, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the ‘fifth essence’ of ancient and mediaeval philosophy, supposed to the substance of which the heavenly bodies were composed, and to be actually latent in all things, the extraction of it being one of the great objects of alchemy.” By extension the word came to mean “the most essential feature of some non-material thing,” and was used in this sense by Milton with reference to “The Law of England, which Lawyers say is the quintessence of reason.”

The “four essential human freedoms” apostrophised by Roosevelt, who, elsewhere in the address, insists that “there is nothing mysterious about the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy,” are “freedom of thought and expression,” “freedom of every person to worship God in his own way,” “freedom from want,” and “freedom from fear.” But, as earlier in his oration he nominates, among the “simple things expected by our people of their political and economic systems,” such social objectives as “equality of opportunity,” “jobs for those who can work,” “security for those who need it,” and “the ending of special privileges for the few,” one is left wondering whether the quintessence of liberty is not, after all, a good deal more mysterious—more alchemical, I almost want to say—than the geopolitical exigencies of January 1941 would allow the champion of “a healthy and strong democracy” to acknowledge.

Thus equality of opportunity, for example, must surely conflict with the freedom to worship God in one’s own way, for the obvious reason that the spiritual hierarchism of revealed religion has no room for the positivist absurdities of a few loquacious and regicidal laymen. Similarly, special privileges for the few—regarded, under the rubric of “eminences,” by John Stuart Mill as integral to the survival of disinterested discourse, and hence of liberty – can hardly be ended without cardinal damage to the freedom of thought and expression. Security for those who need it, while superficially harmonious with the freedom from want due to the vagueness of both guarantees, is little more than a lunchbox of great expectations carefully packed by dialectical materialism’s Pandora. Finally, jobs for those who can work, rather than for those who want to work, or indeed for those momentarily at a loss as to how to avoid what might seem to them a terrible eventuality, is a near verbatim quotation from Marx and a resounding betrayal of the promised freedom from fear.

“Who doesn’t work, doesn’t eat,” the Party bureaucrat of my childhood murmured with satisfaction as he pushed the beluga tin closer to his heaping plate. Meanwhile, somewhere in a courtroom of his almost platonically ideal Republic, the following exchange, equally characteristic of the epoch, was taking place:

Judge: What is your occupation?

Defendant: I write poetry. I translate poetry.

Judge: Why have you not been working?

Defendant: But I have been. I have been writing and translating.

Judge: We’re not interested in that. What is your profession?

Defendant: Poet. Poet and translator.

Judge: But who allowed you to call yourself a poet? Who appointed you a translator?

Defendant: And who appointed me a human being?

Judge: Don’t be a smart aleck. Did you study to become one?

Defendant: Which?

Judge: A poet. Did you attend an institution of higher learning where they teach… where they prepare…

Defendant: I didn’t think it was a matter of learning.

Judge: What is it a matter of then?

Defendant: It’s a matter of having a gift… from God.

It is less important, perhaps, to note that the above stenographic record involved a future laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature than that the court sentenced Joseph Brodsky to five years of compulsory labour. For literary prizes, academic honours, and works published by important houses to enthusiastic notices from tenured university professors, all that may be thought of as politics by other means. Five years in exile, on the other hand, for a frail balding youth made to shovel frozen gravel, is an undeniably harsh reality.

The crime of which the denizen of the ideal Republic was convicted by the Leningrad court, was shirking, this legal concept having been formally introduced to Soviet legislation, as Article 209 of the Penal Code, in 1971. The law against tuneyadstvo, literally “vain eating”—directed against “vagrancy, beggary and other parasitic modes of existence” and providing severe penalties for the lifestyle, “facilitated by unearned income, of a healthy adult shirking socially useful labour”—sat comfortably upon the framework of Stalin’s Constitution of 1936, whose Article 60 stated that “evading socially useful labour shall be incompatible with the founding principles of our society.” As late as 1985, “a clarion call to block all deviation” from these principles, “and in particular to put a concerted end to such sources of unearned income as yet exist,” was made by Mikhail Gorbachev, admittedly not in his later role as liberator of mankind from the shackles of communism, but in his original role as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Like Plato’s, the Republic whose custody Gorbachev inherited from Stalin was before all else a domain of reason, in any case far more overtly and consciously so than the one presided over by Roosevelt. The rule of precedent extolled by Milton, the lares and penates underlying an ancient way of life, the unreflecting respect in which the madcap uses or antic customs of a contentedly civilian populace are universally held, all these are but trammels to social engineering in peacetime. But even in a time of war, as Roosevelt is only too well aware throughout his speech, such trammels may be too formidable to permit a wholesale suspension of the mysterious, intractable, living amalgam of ruling tradition and civic hereditament that goes by the name of liberty. In may suit a democratic politician to rationalise this alchemical essence by reducing it, in the alembic of rhetoric, to a catalogue of virtues, just as it may suit a village oaf to trivialise it in his local pub, by claiming that the supply of such virtues is inexhaustible in so far they stem from himself, his people, his country right or wrong. Alchemy is not an applied science, however, and it will not be used.

The freedom of sloth, by my own present reckoning, is a far more incisive litmus test of social, economic and political liberty than any of the cardinal virtues of democracy, or any of the freedoms that assure them, in Roosevelt’s catalogue. Entailing as it does vagrancy, mendicancy, itinerancy of purpose and dreaminess of intent, it is that conditio sine qua non for the want of which a polity loses not only its prophets and poets, but its philosophers and scientists as well. For any thinker who does not make a livelihood writing Hollywood film scripts, household manuals, or common pornography, is essentially a social parasite who thrives on intellectual doubt; remove that sense of indeterminacy from his life, and the Galileo, the Copernicus, the Lavoisier, the Dostoevsky, the Twain, the Orwell are no more; in their place are members of a national trades union of thinkers. Their vain-eating “mode of existence,” to quote Article 209 of the Soviet Penal Code, is rooted in vain hopes and no less vain visions, in vain introspection, in vain expectation of significant, life-changing juxtapositions and coincidences.

Consider the revealing coincidence that on the very day Roosevelt’s speechwriters from the American political thinkers’ union were sweating to prepare his address, Orwell was writing an article for the Evening Standard, which ran on 8 January 1941. “The totalitarian states can do great things,” he wrote in the article, “but there is one thing they cannot do: they cannot give the factory-worker a rifle and tell him to take it home and keep it in his bedroom. THAT RIFLE HANGING ON THE WALL OF THE WORKING-CLASS FLAT OR LABOURER’S COTTAGE IS THE SYMBOL OF DEMOCRACY. IT IS OUR JOB TO SEE THAT IT STAYS THERE.” How eccentric his thinking must have seemed in 1941. How alive it was, how mercurial, how alchemically precise when compared with Roosevelt’s rigid yet vacuous formulas!

Alas, in the superweapon age in which totalitarianism has found new footing, Orwell’s litmus test has become obsolete. Provided microchip implants are in their necks, a totalitarian state can allow its citizens to decorate their walls with rifles, or at least with ornamental daggers as in Chechnya. But there is one thing that a totalitarian state, or a Western democracy losing its libertarian bearings, cannot do: it cannot allow shirking. “The best way of dealing with the few slackers or trouble-makers in our midst,” declares Roosevelt with Gorbachevian finality, “is, first, to shame them by patriotic example, and if that fails, to use the sovereignty of government to save government.” Use media and peer pressure; use the full coercive power of the taxation system; use the surveillance and crime prevention mechanisms; use the letter of the law, if necessary, to shut off such sources of unearned income as yet exist; but get those slacking parasites under control by closing the loopholes that allow them to feed on society.

Today, more than half a century after Orwell’s death, as a rapidly totalitarianizing America, using phantom menaces far less conducive to genuine eloquence than in Roosevelt’s day, uses real menaces to suppress the freedom of thought and expression, one remembers the Brodsky episode with a certain degree of nostalgia. How can a mendicant friar get by without a bank account in today’s Assisi? So, no St Francis then. How can a real poet, without an employer’s reference, find monastic seclusion in our epoch’s Amherst? What a pity, no Emily Dickinson. How can a visionary tinker get funding for his research in nanotechnology, warning President Bush in a single-spaced letter that China is thirty years ahead of the United States in the development of post-nuclear superweapons? Too bad for the Einstein of today. He is but a vain fantasist.

Stalin, who espoused the profound rationalism of a Constitution that made socially useful labour into universal law, lost out on Europe’s scientific genius and therefore on world domination. So did Hitler, who espoused no less remarkable a rationalism of his very own. History has shown that neither the White Sea Canal nor Zyklon-B gas was an innovation on the level of “Jewish physics.” But even in the United States of Roosevelt’s day, Einstein had only just slipped through the loophole of vain-dream dreaming, useful-work shirking and unearned-income slacking which a militarising democracy had left open in the confusion of mobilisation. Today he would be lucky to get a green card, to say nothing of university tenure.

All of this is to suggest that every society raising a yardstick with which to measure the usefulness of its denizens, whether speculative like Plato’s or rhetorical like Roosevelt’s, will fall by the yardstick more surely than by the sword. A totalitarian polity may see it as opportune to make all into useful soldiers; a liberal democracy, into productive taxpayers; yet in so doing, each will lose out, in its turn, on the indefinable, mysterious, alchemical component of liberty in the absence of which the cleverest of soldiers defect to the enemy and the likeliest of taxpayers move their banking offshore. As for the greatest of thinkers, instead of dying in picturesque squalor, as was once their natural lot, in an America envisioned by Roosevelt in “The Four Freedoms” they never get round to thinking in the first place.

]]>Articles by Andrei NavrozovWhat the Loser Winstag:takimag.com,2007:article/1.106582007-03-20T03:01:00Z1999-11-30T00:00:00ZAndrei Navrozovandreinavrozov@yahoo.com“In countries where military service has been abolished,” my Russian gambling companion blurts out, his eyes taking on the glint of anodised steel, “young people should be sent to the casinos. Compulsory draft, you see? Two years minimum. The state pays for the lot, of course.” He is a celebrated photographer who lives and works in London, with many books and exhibitions to his credit. Once, at a dinner with Taki Theodoracopulos, sore after a particularly bad night at Aspinall’s, he told the poor little rich Greek: “Cheer up, Taki, I’ve lost as much over the last year. Except that in my case it meant losing my house, my studio, my wife and my dog. And my only regret at the moment, I swear, is that I have nothing more to lose.” I had never seen our beloved controversialist more thoughtful.
Another friend, the musical luminary Yuri Bashmet, is famous in our little circle for covering the whole layout with chips, which at every spin bestrew the roulette table like the autumn leaves of Vallombrosa in Milton’s poem. If one listens carefully above the whirring, one can hear him mutter, as he lowers his imperfectly sober face to the green baize: “At least… I won’t… have cancer… ladies and gentlemen… of the jury.” And, as this musician of genius descends the stairs of Aspinall’s and pauses by the now-darkened aquarium by the door, he turns to his entourage to say: “You think you’re coming to see me play in Albert Hall tomorrow night? But how foolish of you. This was playing!”

“I never gamble,” stammers another reckless gambler, uncertain that I will divine the occult wisdom of his apophthegm, “though once in a while I go to Aspinall’s to worship at the altars of chance.” He is right to hesitate, of course. His is a point not easily grasped by minds brought up on the heavenless, altarless, riskless stuff of modernity.

In London, where much of what once kept me happy here has now been uprooted and ploughed under, casinos are among the last anachronisms going. Privately owned and codified in law as membership clubs, they range from the Chinese-populated, cigarette-burns-in-the-carpet, fifty-people-to-a-table emporiums like the Victoria in Marble Arch to the inwardly tense, yet outwardly Olympian, temples to the divinity of chance like the Clermont in Berkeley Square. The truth – that all of them, high and low, with the blessed exception of the late John Aspinall’s tabernacle in Curzon Street, are owned by casino chains, vast corporate bureaucracies with ties to Las Vegas – need not be dwelled on, at least so long as their residually Edwardian-minded managers remain unanimous on the virtue of concealing it from the general public. Thus a stretch limousine will still carry the melancholy loser home through the blackness of Mayfair night from even the shabbiest of playgrounds, without his having to present a vehicle request in triplicate with two forms of personal identification to some bright-eyed vixen in an ill-fitting trouser suit of gorgeous lime green.

Apart from the free ride, what is it that the loser wins? I have been pondering this question for the better part of a decade, with financial consequences that many of my friends would describe as unwelcome. And it has become clear to me that I simply cannot not write about playing roulette in London, for exactly the same reasons that I cannot not write about the roast suckling pig with myrtle leaves that I sampled in Porto Istana in Sardinia, or the grace of the Syrian woman whom chance once placed on my right at a friend’s dinner party in Beirut, or the voice of Laura Giordano in Cimarosa’s Matrimonio Segreto at the Barbican. These too are anachronisms, after all, the ebbing life of an island village, the outmoded, harem femininity of an Eastern dancer, and the Europe just beginning to die of consumption in Cimarosa’s duets, “among the most beautiful,” wrote Stendhal, “that the human spirit has ever conceived.”

But chief among these is the anachronism of individual liberty. And what the loser wins, I say to confound my tight-fisted critics, is his liberty, in particular his freedom from the totalitarian dominion of universal reason – meaning science, accounting, insurance, actuary tables, received wisdom, tinpot democracy, paper money, Aristotle’s law of excluded middle and bank holiday weekends, to name just a few of the tyrannous certainties of modernity. By wagering a part of his life that is in real time – by tradition, casinos do not allow clocks on the premises – he gains admittance to the realm of dreams that Shakespeare, having catalogued but a handful of the “thousand natural shocks” to which the flesh of a disinherited nobleman is heir, makes his hero ponder.

I have always held that, in the epochal storm that has been gathering over our civilization since 1789, the wise man should think like a pessimist and live like an optimist. In social terms, this means seeing yourself as a impoverished nobleman while suffering others to see you as a rich bourgeois. In the casino, one is finally alone with one’s thoughts and one’s freedoms, and the percentage of one’s material losses, if there be losses, is but the peppercorn rent for the temporary accommodation of a lacerated and destitute individuality.

There was a time when noblemen, from Charlemagne to Tolstoy, went to church – among other reasons – to feel mortal, ordinary, part of the human herd. In the epoch that began in Europe with the rise of the bourgeoisie under the banner of universal reason, and is now nearing its ineluctable denouement in universal slavery, noblemen went to the casino to feel noble, uncommon, above the herd. Not surprisingly, it was in the eighteenth century, when the authority of chance (that is, of birth) was first challenged by that of reason (that is, of money), that gambling it its modern form, and the game of roulette in particular, first arrived in France and England.

Before that, casinos had famously existed in Venice, that autarchic microcosm where the notion of a sovereign aristocracy had been under threat from the mercantile classes already by Shakespeare’s day. “In sooth I know not why I am so sad,” Antonio sets the tone of that epoch in the opening line of The Merchant of Venice, presaging the crushing melancholy to which the lone individual – who now begins to see himself as a dispossessed aristocrat of the spirit – has well and truly succumbed by the nineteenth century, as in Heine’s Ich weiss nicht, was soll es bedeauten,
Dass ich so traurig bin.

It is significant that gambling is not really written about in the West today, any more than it was written about in Russia when Dostoevsky was first smitten by roulette at Bad Homburg and proceeded to reform his whole creative existence to accommodate the experience. In part this is due to the fact that only in London do casinos still give the player the sense of having found a refuge from the sadness, and the conformity, and the plain boringness of our common totalitarian era that, unbeknown to many, has long begun the countdown to spiritual zero. The gross, modern, and crooked casinos of Venice, Monte Carlo, or Las Vegas – collectively far better known throughout the world than their putative London cousins – actually bear almost no relation to the anachronism I am trying to describe here as the source of the kind of liberating experience that Dostoevsky craved in his day.

The other, still more important cause of the silence that envelops gamblers and gambling, is that the West’s writers and journalists are themselves children of reason, bourgeois Sid Sawyers unable to perceive that without hunting, shooting, wenching, whoring, drinking, fighting, snorting, spitting and cursing – in short, without some risk of actual harm to one’s life, or limb, or at least reputation – their own bovinely revered culture would have had no twentieth century, and not much of the nineteenth either. “Almost all our literature and art,” wrote Remy de Gourmont in Epilogues, “were born from prostitution, licence, irregularity.” It is true that a newspaper hack of today may go undercover to explore the secret world of massage parlours, while an Ivy League professor will sleep with as many coeds as there are in his English class, or else follow in the footsteps of Castaneda and gather dangerous herbs by moonlight in the town common. But where, I ask you, is the risk in that?

What is still more revealing is to catch adults in the act of explaining things to children. What an avalanche of arrogant verbosity does one see crashing about those innocent little heads! How shamelessly is the word because abused, whether the subject of instruction is volcanoes, onions, or archangels! And what an ingenuous way the old have devised to educate the young in the sacred principles of causality: “Don’t,” they are ever warning them, “because…” Don’t play with fire because you’ll hurt yourself. Don’t touch the vase because it’ll fall and break. Don’t go into the forest because it’s easy to get lost there. And when the child rummages in the hearth without getting burned, when the Chinese vase stands as before, or when a sun-warmed handful of wild strawberries is held right up to the sceptical adult snout, they just shrug. The statistics, they think, are on the side of the house.

Whenever he gets it wrong, the gambler has to pay. Not so with our culture, which seems to think it can be wrong as often as it likes, without ever having to pay a forfeit. Didn’t you crucify your God? Lose Rome to the barbarians? Kill off half the adult population of Europe in a matter of decades? Ah, yes, well, but it all worked out in the end, because we aren’t just individuals, you know. We’re not some bunch of crazy gamblers. We are the institution, the corporation, the casino. We can lose without ever feeling the pain. There’s always plenty of other suckers out there.

The Aristotelian organum, which has increasingly dominated our culture since the Renaissance and found its ultimate expression in the binary code of the computer, has had the effect of reducing Western thought to the level of a game called “20 Rational Questions.” Information, fragmented into bits fixed with A-or-not-A certitude, is used to describe the world with the pixel-pat cynicism of a television image. Yet the picture on the screen is but an artless, airless lie, a tendentious fiction, a mendacious tautology of cause and effect that leaves the substance of life almost totally unexplained. For can’t a woman be ugly and alluring at the same time? Can’t a tall handsome grenadier behave as a vile coward, despite his manly moustache? Can’t a saintly hermit plausibly seduce and then strangle a twelve-year-old? Can’t a dissident rabbi turn water into wine? Can’t a rosy-cheeked Sicilian soprano, without a care in the world to speak of, embody human suffering in Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater? Can’t a person win big at roulette?

The practical applications of science – whence the modern philistine’s concept of miracle is derived, just as his concept of pleasure, generally speaking, is derived from pornography – now have the world to themselves, and are the gospels of the religion of rationalism. Which is not to say that the other, forgotten, losing religion, though based on the irrational premise of the transcendent miracle of life, was ever illogical. For instance, while it would be right to say that Abraham was given the Promised Land because he had come to believe in the Promise, it would be wrong to say that the Flood came because Noah had started building the Ark.

Apart from being undoubtedly evil – undoubtedly, at least, for those who know whither leads the road paved with good intentions – Enlightenment ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity are above all rational. Hope, faith and charity are not. In fact, I would venture to argue that nothing in Christianity, beyond what is already contained in the salutary commandments of the Old Testament, is rational in this sense. How did it come to pass, then, that our professedly Christian, Western culture lost its intuitive moorings to become what it now is, a monstrous double of the pompous know-it-all in Moliere, an adding machine ever crunching meaningless numbers, a travesty-voiced robot spouting syllogistic banalities until the battery runs out and the eternal night of totalitarianism descends?

I am not saying that we must all turn to Eastern mysticism, or try walking on water after a heavy lunch, or even be portrayed by Francis Bacon in attitudes expressive of inner torment. But come on, live a little! Let the careless child burn his fingers playing with matches. Let the faithful adoring wife go on worshipping her husband, the idler in a spotted cravat who is secretly taking all her jewellery to the pawnbrokers. Let the clueless dreamer have a go at saving the fallen woman, who is meanwhile using his driving license to rent the getaway car for a bank heist. Let the frustrated poet take the stretch limousine to the Pieria of emerald baize, where he may or may not lose his shirt of fine cambric linen.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, as my gambling friend Yuri Bashmet would say, judge for yourselves. If our civilization has so botched the job of saving itself collectively, if our culture has proved itself so unfit to defend itself rationally, who is to say that the individual man, woman, or child will not be luckier when beyond the confines of reason? For life, in the only form in which it is worth living, is as spontaneous, unpredictable, and complex as the components of the sacred flame in which Christianity incinerated its heretics, in contrast to the chemically pure Zyklon gas later used by the rational West to affirm its total power over the divine play of chance and the unknowable that is the human spirit.

A shorter version of this article appeared in the Autumn/Winter number of Aspinall’s Magazine and is reproduced here with the permission of the Editor.